Tunes – or chunes, as Arthur Parker, the song salesman, talking with the perpetual common cold of the Cockney, pronounces it – tunes do help you breathe more easily. During the rainy 30s a succession of songs insisted that sunshine was coming. Soft-centred, sweet-toothed songs that old Black Magic. There wasn’t too much bread about so let them eat chocolates.

Songs that the trade at the time wickedly called womb tremblers because they stirred you up inside like a spoon … moon… June. Ah Bisto.

The odd thing is that Dennis Potter, a stripling of some 42 summers, cannot possibly remember the period. He thinks he can. But he can’t. It is even more evocative for that. In Pennies From Heaven (BBC1) he has written an enchanting musical, distinctly related to Oh What a Lovely War. Here and there the humdrum story of Arthur Parker, the commercial traveller in sheet music glows rosy and flowers into song. It was an accepted thing in musicals for the hero, finding himself in the middle of Fifth Avenue, to start singing, say, “I’ve got a yes, no, maybe baby,” following this with an animated tap dance and whirling a flat foot round the flower stall for a finale. The passing crowd would either show no surprise at all or smile sympathetically. In no case did the song and dance man find himself telling it to the judge in the morning.

These sudden bursts of birdsong in lives otherwise spent grubbing about for food were evidently dream sequences, bubbles of love, balloons of tunes. As though the music went round and around and just had to come out somewhere… Those who couldn’t speak, sang.

Pennies From Heaven is delicious, delightful and de-lovely with a dark undertow and runs for six weeks, so aren’t you lucky? The ordinary little people open their mouths and mime the sweet, sweet heart-stopping songs of the 30s as if they were mediums possessed by the spirits of love and hope.

Under the skin of Dennis Potter

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It has a quite remarkable performance by Bob Hoskins as Arthur, the traveller in dreams. A bun-faced man but with, as Potter says at one point, dilating on the delights of doughnuts, “quite half a pound of jam in him.” A luscious performance. And Kenneth Colley as the Accordion Man who is not quite all there so where, one wonders uneasily, is he?

Whatever happened to all those accordions often played three at a time by girls in short satin skirts and Kardomah bows at considerable personal risk to their busts? Where did all the commercial travellers go, forever travelling hopefully? In any ordinary musical Arthur, who can’t sell his songs, and the Accordion Man, who plays hymns unprofitably, would have teamed up and topped the bill. But it is no ordinary musical. Extraordinary. Quite extraordinary.